No Regrets!

Last night brought a bit of stress. I was unable to secure timely bus tickets to Mishima Station, necessary for catching our scheduled shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto later in the day. Every ticket during our small window of flexibility was already sold out. Read the rest of this entry »

We checked out of our Tokyo hotel and left Kabukichō behind. While Tokyo is famously neat and tidy, it was early enough in the morning that the streets of Kabukichō were still littered with trash from the previous night’s revelry. It looked jarringly un-Japanese. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave emerged from his room with an enthusiastic high-five. Eight solid hours of sleep. We took a lazy morning to recharge and blog before heading out into another crisp, sunny Tokyo day.

It took us a while to figure out the Tokyo taxi system, but I thnk we’ve cracked it. Red windshield lights mean vacant, yellow means off-duty, and no light means occupied. If you hail one that is not available, sometimes the driver will do the very Japanese thing of making an X with their fingers, which means no. Inside the taxis, Dave and I are becoming very familiar with the seven commercials in rotation on the seat-back screens. Some of them, including one that seems to feature a transgender bunny, are particularly annoying. I don’t know how the drivers, who have to listen to them all day, stay sane. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave did not sleep last night. Well, he did, but only for three hours. He tried everything, from sleeping aids to listening to his meditation music. He counted to 10,468 before giving up. Every siren from the streets below found a way to pierce through his noise-canceling headphones. Nothing worked. And then his mind started worrying about not sleeping, which of course set him spinning and produced more anxiety and made it worse. Turns out his worrying about the dinner in Tokyo Skytree, which is what he thought was keeping him up for the first couple of nights, was never the issue after all. Something else is afoot. Is he still struggling with the time difference? Read the rest of this entry »

I woke up this morning feeling amazing. Rested, recharged, and adjusted to Japan time. Dave, on the other hand, was a mess. He barely slept last night, victim of the jet lag and wracked with the crippling anxiety of tonight’s dinner at Sky Restaurant 634. The restaurant is on the 345th floor of Tokyo Skytree, the highest tower in Japan. Dave has known this and been nervous about it for months. Today is the day, and Dave is so crushed by his debilitating fear of heights that he couldn’t sleep. Blackout curtains, melatonin, noise-canceling earbuds, and binaural meditation music did not help. Read the rest of this entry »

They kept us well-fed on the plane, first with chicken teriyaki and then a ham sandwich and finally a cheese omelet. After meal service, the windows in the cabin were dimmed to the extreme, rendering the sky nearly black and the sun as a bright, perfectly round disc. An otherworldly scene with a dark blue glow that my puny iPhone camera sensor couldn’t capture. So beautiful, I couldn’t stop staring at it. Read the rest of this entry »

So the baseball gods frowned upon us, knocking out all Tokyo teams and sending the Hanshin Tigers and Softbank Hawks to the Japan Series. Games will be in Osaka and Fukuoka, too far for us to reach easily from Tokyo. Alas, there will be no live Japanese baseball for us on this trip. We will have to settle for the local sports bar experience in Tokyo. Read the rest of this entry »

As preparations for our Japan trip wind down, I turn my attention to more thoughtful ponderings on the place we are going, a place with rich history and a culture perhaps more different from my own than any other. Read the rest of this entry »

In just three weeks, Dave and I are off to Japan. We’ve both been working feverishly to fine-tune our itinerary, with my focus being activities and transportation logistics. This has been surprisingly tedious and complicated, as my assumption was that, in a country where toilets have more buttons than my TV remote, I assumed the online booking experience would would be sleek and efficient. But it turns out that many of Japan’s booking websites and apps look like they were built by a high school student in the mid-90’s, don’t work they way they should, and sometimes don’t work at all. Read the rest of this entry »

The planning continues. It took some patience with surprisingly clunky and poorly translated Japanese websites, but all of our accommodations for the trip are booked!

As expected, Dave opted for the bougiest hotels he could find for our big city stays, and he’s really outdone himself. The two-bedroom suite we’ll be sharing in the Bellustar Tokyo looks exquisite, and the Four Seasons Kyoto is just as nice. He’s also booked the W Osaka, which is as beautiful as you’d expect any W property to be. Read the rest of this entry »